Susan Shelley: Flap over flag tells only half the story

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FILE – In this July 19, 2011 file photo, Confederate battle flags fly outside the museum at the Confederate Memorial Park in Mountain Creek, Ala., Tuesday, July 19, 2011. Major retailers are halting sales of the Confederate flag after the June 17, 2015 shooting deaths of nine black church members in South Carolina.

I’m sorry to break the news to you on the Fourth of July, but Betsy Ross did not design or sew the first American flag. It’s just one more bit of history that didn’t happen exactly the way it’s now remembered.

The legend began in 1870, when Ross’ grandson, William Canby, told the Historical Society of Pennsylvania — without any real evidence — that George Washington asked his grandmother to make the flag. There is a famous portrait by artist Charles H. Weisgerber showing Betsy Ross sewing the flag in her Philadelphia parlor, but it was painted in 1893, not 1776.

In another bit of confused history, the Dukes of Hazzard did not fight in the Confederate Army. They were not even real people.

Just the same, on Wednesday Viacom pulled the reruns of the 1980s-era TV show from cable network TV Land’s schedule, infuriating fans and at least one of the show’s stars, John Schneider. By Thursday afternoon, almost 45,000 people had signed a change.org petition demanding the return of Bo and Luke Duke, their cousin Daisy, town politician Boss Hogg and the General Lee — a 1969 Dodge Charger with the Confederate flag painted on its roof.

Back then, this silly TV show about comic Southerners could feature the rebel flag on a stock car without a single sponsor raising an objection. Today the biggest companies in America are rushing to sweep away that symbol, which now has been assigned to take the blame for racism throughout American history.

If truth be told, there’s plenty of blame to go around. Slavery and segre­gation were not a purely Southern phenomenon.

For starters, not all the slave states were in the Confederacy. Missouri, Delaware, Kentucky and Maryland all were slave states, and they did not secede from the Union. President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 didn’t free the slaves in those four states, only in the states that were “in rebellion.” It was the 13th Amendment, in 1865, that ended slavery.

And while we’re on the subject of Lincoln, he gave a speech in 1859 in Columbus, Ohio, in which he declared himself to be a supporter of white supremacy “as much as any other man.”

That speech probably didn’t make it into Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” but it happened just the same.

If you think segregation was just a Southern thing, guess again. After the Civil War, Congress passed a Civil Rights Act to guarantee the fundamental rights of the freed slaves, but lawmakers wrote it very carefully to preserve racially segregated schools — in the North.

The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, guaranteed equal protection of the law, which sounds like it would have ended segregation. It didn’t. In the 1870s and early 1880s, lawsuits were filed to challenge segregated schools in Ohio, Indiana, Nevada, New York and, yes, California. All the lawsuits failed. Segregation was upheld by the courts every time.

It wasn’t until 1954, when the U.S. Supreme Court overruled all earlier precedents with its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, that racial segregation in schools was declared unconstitutional.

The court’s series of desegregation decisions roughly coincided with the centennial of the Civil War, so when the Confederate battle flag began to surface at Southern capitols in the 1950s and early ’60s, some people may have interpreted it, or intended it, as a symbol of support for continuing segregation in defiance of the federal government.

But the segregationists lost that fight. That’s part of our history, too.

We can learn from history, but we can’t erase it. Our challenge is to build forward. Thomas Paine wrote in 1776, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

Two hundred and thirty-nine years later, he’s still right.

Susan Shelley is a San Fernando Valley author, a former television associate producer and twice a Republican candidate for the California Assembly. Reach her at Susan@SusanShelley.com, or follow her on Twitter: @Susan_Shelley.